BASEBALL

BASEBALL; Baseball Has Nothing to Say About Doubleday's Alleged Slur

Published: March 12, 1994

Bud Selig, the acting commissioner, said yesterday that he did not know whether major league baseball would look into reports that one of the Mets' owners, Nelson Doubleday, had made anti-Semitic remarks. Selig said he had only read news accounts of the alleged remarks and so could not comment on them.

A new book about the business of baseball attributes an anti-Semitic quotation to Doubleday, and a former Met employee also said he had heard Doubleday make such comments occasionally during his tenure with the team.

Doubleday, in a statement released by the team, denied making the comment attributed to him in the book, and Fred Wilpon, the Mets' co-owner, who is Jewish, has vigorously defended his partner, saying, "People that know Nelson know that's not the way Nelson feels."

In the book, "Lords of the Realm" (Villard Books), John Helyar, a Wall Street Journal reporter who co-wrote the best-selling "Barbarians at the Gate," described how the league presidents, Bobby Brown and Bill White, acceded to a request by team owners to call a meeting to dismiss Commissioner Fay Vincent.

Helyar quotes Doubleday as saying to White, " 'Well, I guess the Jewboys have gotten to you,' " referring to Selig, the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, and Jerry Reinsdorf, the owner of the Chicago White Sox.

Arthur Richman, a former traveling secretary for the Mets and now a consultant with the Yankees, said Thursday night that he often heard Doubleday make anti-Semitic comments. In a contentious parting, Richman was let go by the Mets before the 1989 season.